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We all have 5 senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. So who’s to say any one sense is more important to us in our purchasing decisions?

While word of mouth is undoubtedly the “holy grail” of recommendations, new social applications are showing us that some of our other senses might also play a key role in influence. Here’s a look at some of the latest and greatest innovations in social media driving organic word of mouth, eye, ear and smell, among consumers:

Pinterest: Recently, TechCrunch announced that Pinterest hit 11.7 million unique monthly users, making it the fastest growing standalone site in history. With so many early adopters, the digital pin board is already showing huge potential to change the landscape of social commerce. With word of mouth recommendations being the number one driver of consumer purchases, Pinterest acts as a stream of “visual recommendations”, endorsed by the very people who are most likely to influence your purchasing decisions—your friends and others with common interests. Pinterest doesn’t use words to recommend brand products so much as it uses pictures endorsed from friends in the form of repins and likes.  In the future, this will prove to be a huge opportunity for brands and products on Pinterest.
Spotify: Over the past decade, the way people listen and share music with one another has drastically changed and evolved. Spotify isn’t the first platform to allow social music sharing, but it’s certainly one that has gotten recognition over the last few months for its integration with Facebook and collaborative brand playlists. Spotify users can connect to the service via their Facebook and Twitter accounts, allowing you can see what your friends are listening to, and hit play to hear their tracks instantly, directly from your Facebook newsfeed. But the big potential for Spotify to drive word of mouth recommendations comes from collaborative brand playlists. Brands are beginning to utilize Spotify to insert themselves into the conversation and connect with consumers around a common interest: music. For example, take Herbal Essences recent campaign, Songs You Sing in the Shower. Realizing that many consumers have a favorite song they like to sing in the shower, Herbal Essence partnered up with Spotify to create a branded Spotify playlist. Users were able to upload their favorite songs into the Herbal Essence playlist and share it among their social networks, recommending the music and brand to their peers. While just one example of ways to connect to consumers via music, Spotify definitely offers some novel opportunities for brands.
Postcard on the Run App: People are always looking for new ways to upload, organize and share their photos socially. So it comes as no surprise the rise in popularity of mobile photography and photo-sharing smartphone apps, particularly, postcard apps such as Postcards on the Run, Postagram and Touchnote. These apps allow consumers to convert any picture taken on their smartphone devices to physical postcards that are sent by snail-mail to their receivers. While there’s huge potential for these postcard apps to facilitate word of mouth recommendations alone among consumers, the Postcard on the Run app is taking it a step further by also offering their users the option of sending scented postcards. With nearly a dozen scents to choose from including suntan lotion, holiday spice and popcorn, users can now send postcards to their friends or families with scented memories of their beach vacations or holiday parties. Marketers and brands can also leverage the popularity of these postcard apps by partnering with them to create branded themed postcards, branded postage stamps, and even branded scents.